Capturing The Geek

TFSBuild 2010 & NUnit Integration

Wednesday 04 January 2012 at 12:30 pm

Always keen that our adopted environment shouldn't dictate tooling it was important that we could achieve a good level integration between with testing tools and Team Foundation Server; however as TFS 2010 moved to using web services and XAML build workflow it can look rather challenging.

Looking at integration we identified two essential requirements;

• NUnit-Console test runner executes as part of the build workflow
• Test results are published back into TFS 2010 and statistics

Bin deploying linked files

Friday 16 December 2011 at 09:18 am

If like me you don't want to have duplicate copies of your bin dependencies between your libraries/packages folder and "/_bin_deployableAssemblies" you'll want to link them; unfortunately the default Microsoft.WebApplication.targets won't publish them - absurd I know!

Through experimentation I've found the most elegant solution is to have have a custom targets files (checked into source control and branched from a common location) that I import into my web projects. It simply overrides one of the targets in Microsoft.WebApplication.targets and copies linked files to a bin sub-folder before adding them to the CreateItem collection that is later used when building/publishing.

CopyLinkedBinDeployableAssemblies.targets

<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <Target Name="_CopyBinDeployableAssemblies" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\_bin_deployableAssemblies')">
    <Copy Condition=" '%(Content.Link)' != '' " SourceFiles="%(Content.Identity)" DestinationFiles="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bin\%(Content.Link)" />
    <CreateItem Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bin\_bin_deployableAssemblies\**\*.*" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\bin\_bin_deployableAssemblies')">
      <Output ItemName="_binDeployableAssemblies" TaskParameter="Include" />
    </CreateItem>
    <CreateItem Include="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\_bin_deployableAssemblies\**\*.*" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\_bin_deployableAssemblies')">
      <Output ItemName="_binDeployableAssemblies" TaskParameter="Include" />
    </CreateItem>
    <Copy SourceFiles="@(_binDeployableAssemblies)" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)\%(RecursiveDir)" SkipUnchangedFiles="true" Retries="$(CopyRetryCount)" RetryDelayMilliseconds="$(CopyRetryDelayMilliseconds)" />
  </Target>
</Project>;

Then in my web .csproj project file add an import link to the new targets file;

<Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\..\..\BuildSupport\Targets\CopyLinkedBinDeployableAssemblies.targets" />

Important! Make sure you put this after the Import to Microsoft.WebApplication.targets.

Finally...

There seems to be a myth that _bin_deployableAssemblies is MVC3 only which of course is utter tosh, this works for any project that uses Microsoft.WebApplication.targets; I know this as we use it in our FubuMVC projects to copy Simple.Data MEF dependencies

Git mergetool with Araxis

Monday 05 December 2011 at 10:00 pm

Just thought I'd drop this quick note should you also find the settings on the Araxis website don't work with your .gitconfig, I went through many attempts but this simple version worked for me.

[merge]
	tool = araxis
[mergetool "araxis"]
	cmd = araxisgitmerge.exe \"$REMOTE\" \"$BASE\" \"$PWD/LOCAL\" \"$PWD/MERGED\"

…or alternatively…

git config --global merge.tool araxis
git config --global mergetool.araxis.cmd 'araxisgitmerge.exe \"$REMOTE\" \"$BASE\" \"$PWD/LOCAL\" \"$PWD/MERGED\"'

Note: I added the Araxis installation directory to my PATH environment variable so not necessary above.